Browser Checks

What a Browser Check Is

A Browser Check runs a real Playwright script in a headless Chromium browser, on a schedule, from LoadFocus cloud regions. Instead of sending a single HTTP request, it drives an actual browser through your site the way a user would, and reports the result of the whole flow.

This covers the parts of your product an HTTP check cannot see, full user journeys rather than single endpoints.

When to Use It

Use a Browser Check to verify complete user flows that an HTTP check cannot:

• Login: sign in with test credentials and confirm the account area loads.
• Search: enter a query and check that results appear.
• Checkout: add a product to the cart and walk through the payment steps.
• Forms: submit a form and verify the confirmation.
• Multi-page journeys: any flow that spans several pages in sequence.

Create a Browser Check

1. Open the New API Check page.
2. Choose Browser Check as the monitor type.
3. Write or paste your Playwright script. It can use your stored variables and secrets, plus reusable snippets and setup/teardown scripts. The script exports an async function that receives page and ctx. Wrap each part of the flow in ctx.step('name', async () => { ... }): only steps wrapped this way get their own timing and screenshot. Read stored values as ctx.vars.NAME and ctx.secrets.NAME.
4. Click Test script to run the script while editing, before you save.
5. Pick your locations, frequency and alert channels, then save. Browser checks run only from the regions where the browser executor is deployed, so the location list can be shorter than for API checks, and the shortest frequency is 5 minutes.
6. Browser checks do not retry. In place of the retry fields you get Alert after N consecutive failures: 0 or 1 alerts on the first failed run.

Script Templates

You do not have to start from a blank script. The Template dropdown above the editor (Start from a template…) holds ten ready-made scripts. Pick one and it replaces the editor's content, after a confirmation so that edits are not lost by accident; then change the URLs, selectors and expected text to match your site:

• Start from scratch: the minimal script every new check starts with.
• Log in with a secret: sign in with credentials stored as secrets and check the dashboard loads.
• Fill in a form: type into a form field, submit it and check the result page.
• Multi-step user journey: walk through several pages, each timed as its own step.
• Wait for an element: wait for content that appears after the page has loaded.
• Check an API value on the page: read a value from your API, then check the page shows it.
• Check the mobile layout: use a phone-sized screen and check that the mobile menu works.
• Dismiss an optional popup: close a cookie banner when it shows, without failing when it does not.
• Block images and analytics: skip images, fonts and tracking scripts so the check runs faster.
• Fail on a slow page: fail the check when the page takes longer than a set limit to load.

Every template wraps its actions in ctx.step, so the run shows a timing and a screenshot per step.

Artifacts and Results

Each run records:

• Screenshots: one per ctx.step, plus a final screenshot of the page.
• Console logs from the browser.
• Network logs: the URL, method and status of each response the page received.
• Per-step timings, so you can see exactly which step slows a flow down.

When a run fails, LoadFocus also keeps a Trace (use Download Trace on the result) and a video of the run. Both are discarded when the run passes.

Quotas and Plans

Browser Checks are available on paid plans only. Starter includes 10 browser checks and 1,000 browser runs a month, Professional 30 checks and 5,000 runs. Browser runs have their own quota, separate from API check runs. See the pricing page for current limits.

For the shared settings, frequency, locations, alert channels, activate/mute, see How to Create a New API Check. Browser Checks are part of the LoadFocus Synthetic Monitoring platform.

Browser Checks read secrets and variables from their own store, separate from API checks: Synthetic monitoring secrets and variables. A value defined for API checks is not visible here.